Kitabı oku: «When Your Eyes Close: A psychological thriller unlike anything you’ve read before!», sayfa 2
CHAPTER TWO
Caitlin
Caitlin Davis closed the door behind her with a mixture of anxiety and relief. She knew what the evening held, but getting through the day until she’d arrived at this moment had been hard. Several times during the afternoon she’d found herself drifting despite the mayhem of the office and the decisions that needed to be made as to what should appear in the next issue of New Woman, the magazine she’d founded almost six years before – the same year she’d met David.
Caitlin threw her handbag down on the bed, sat down and kicked off her shoes. In her stockinged feet she stood on the edge of the bed and removed a box from the top shelf of the wardrobe. Carefully, she climbed down, took the lid off and took out the bundle of photos that lay at the top. David. It was a year today since she’d last seen him. A year since that terrible night when she’d called their friend, Andy, frantic, to tell him he hadn’t come home.
Walking through Dublin city centre that afternoon, everything had reminded her of their time together. She’d passed restaurants where they’d eaten, pubs where they’d gone with friends – places that she’d found it impossible to enter since he’d disappeared. In the days, weeks and months of the last year, every man of his height and build had drawn her attention. Every corner she’d turned she’d expected to see him, and each evening when she’d put her key in the lock it was with a sense of dread at the emptiness ahead.
Caitlin picked up a framed photo and allowed herself to feel the ache that his absence had caused – an ache that she tried to quell by keeping busy, but there was nothing that would make her forget. The void that David had left would always be there – and it was only today – on the anniversary of his disappearance, that she would allow herself to be consumed by the total agony of that absence.
She stared at the picture, taking in his smile, the creases at the corners of his grey eyes, the way he had her wrapped tight, both arms around her. God, they’d been so happy together. She’d loved him so much. There was no way she would ever have let something come between them. What happened had been unprecedented. Another person might have collapsed under it. But she’d experienced pain before and had survived. So instead, she’d done the only thing she could do; summoned all her strength and carried on. No matter what it cost her.
She put the picture to her lips, stood it on the bedside locker and lay back on the bed. For the millionth time, she thought of all that had happened that night, of how dismissive the guards had been when she and Andy had gone to the station to report David missing. They’d buzzed the bell at the desk, waited a good ten minutes before the garda on duty appeared. He’d then taken them through to one of the interview rooms, sat there and, disinterestedly, taken notes. He’d told them that nobody was officially a missing person until the mandatory twenty-four-hour period had elapsed. ‘You don’t understand, David would never do this …’ she’d said. She’d broken down in tears then as Andy explained how David was supposed to meet him that evening and had failed to turn up. He tried to impress on the garda how completely out of character that was for his friend.
They’d taken it more seriously in the days that followed. They’d questioned Caitlin in detail, asked her about David’s behaviour leading up to his disappearance. Had he been acting in any way strange? Had he ever done this type of thing before? How had his mood been in recent weeks? She’d told them that no, there had been no warning, nothing that would have set off alarm bells. As far as she had been concerned everything was fine.
And how was the marriage, they wanted to know: had they been experiencing any difficulties? Perhaps they’d argued? She’d thought of the years they’d been together; they’d hardly ever argued. And, on the rare occasion when she got annoyed, he’d make some joke to make her come around. David was like that; quick-witted and hard to resist. He was also the most stable person she’d known, a foil to her own sudden moods.
She’d gone through the details with them again and again, told them that he’d left for work that morning as normal. He was a music teacher at a secondary school for boys. The school principal had verified that David had turned up for work at 8.30 a.m. as usual and that he’d left at 4 p.m. that afternoon. CCTV footage showed him putting his violin case in the boot of the car before getting in and exiting the school car park.
The police had carried out door-to-door enquiries, establishing that nobody had seen David return to the house that afternoon. His car had been located clamped in a backstreet in the city centre. A place where, unfortunately, there were no cameras. A ticket in the windscreen showed that he’d paid to park until 5.30 p.m., and an assistant in a music shop in George’s Street said that David had been in the store at about 5 p.m. and had bought violin strings. His violin had still been in the boot – one string broken, explaining his purchase. The information given by the music shop assistant had been the last reported sighting.
David’s picture had gone up all over the city, on billboards, in DART and bus stations. It had almost destroyed Caitlin to see his smiling face everywhere she went. And still the guards had found no leads. As the months passed and they began to lose interest, Gillian, David’s mother, had suggested that they hire a private detective. He’d worked on the case for six months until eventually he told Caitlin he didn’t believe he could help her – that sometimes people just didn’t want to be found. For Caitlin that was like a slap to the face. David would never have walked out on their life. It was obvious, she’d told him, that something had happened to prevent his return. A few months later, when she’d met the detective in the street, he suggested that it was time she tried to move on, that it didn’t look as if David were coming back. He’d asked her out for a drink then, and the only emotion she’d felt was a deep sense of revulsion.
She hadn’t got close to anyone since David’s disappearance. It was the last thing she wanted. Recently, she’d even found herself the object of a well-meaning matchmaking scheme by a friend who’d been urging her to get on with her life. This endeavour had simply led to her refusing dinner invitations from such friends who clearly had no understanding of how much David meant to her.
Instead she’d sought to fill the void in other ways. She began running, and soon found herself jogging five kilometres each evening in the local park. Recently she’d pushed herself to seven. She’d lost weight, but that wasn’t her objective. She’d always been slim. She began running to escape the emptiness of the house in David’s absence – and then she found it was the one thing that lessened the stress and helped her to sleep at night. Exhausted, she’d sometimes shower and fall asleep with the TV on, one arm stretched across David’s side of the bed. There were mornings still when she opened her eyes expecting to find him next to her.
David had taught her to play the violin. She still practised most evenings and had joined a group of musicians who did a jam session in a wine bar every Wednesday night. Their friend, Andy, was the cellist and he’d invited her to join. Music was a passion that she and David had shared, and when she played she summoned feelings, not of loss, but of the elation she felt when they were together. Often, she’d sit with Andy over a glass of wine and they’d talk of the past. He was one of the only people she felt truly understood her; the only one who felt David’s loss as keenly as she did.
The phone rang, and Caitlin put the box of photos to the side. She knew that it would be David’s mum. They spoke often, and she knew she’d call on the anniversary of his disappearance. Caitlin had lost her own mother when she was five years old, and Gillian was as warm and compassionate as she imagined a mother should be – unlike the woman who’d brought Caitlin up. During her relationship with David, she’d grown close to his mother and since his disappearance they’d become closer still – each woman seeking a part of him in those he loved.
Caitlin picked up the phone and waited to hear Gillian’s soothing voice. Instead the voice that spoke was male.
‘David’s alive … but don’t try to find him. It could be dangerous for both of you.’
Caitlin tightened her grip on the receiver. ‘Who is this? What do you—?’
Before she could finish speaking, the caller had hung up, and all she heard was the constant blip of the disconnected line. Trembling, she put down the receiver, then picked it up again. What should she do; call Andy, or Gillian? Surely, they’d advise her to call the guards, but what if it was dangerous as the caller had said? Maybe she ought not to tell anyone. She replaced the receiver and tried to clear her mind. Was it a hoax call? If this man knew something, why had he chosen to call now and not before – and why on the anniversary of David’s disappearance?
Caitlin was trying to make sense of the thoughts that collided inside her mind when the phone rang again. After a second’s hesitation, she snatched up the receiver. She didn’t speak but waited for the man to say something first. If he could play games, then so could she, but this time it was the voice of David’s mother that greeted her.
CHAPTER THREE
Michelle
Michelle took a long drink from her water bottle and dabbed the perspiration from her face with a towel as the girls filed past her with smiles and words of thanks for another great Zumba class. She smiled back and said goodnight to each of them by name, but she didn’t feel the buzz that she usually got from the workout. Tonight it had been an effort. Unable to concentrate solely on the music, she’d made some mistakes and slipped into the wrong moves at the wrong time. Not that the women had noticed; it was only three weeks into the course and they’d not yet mastered the choreography that accompanied each song.
Michelle shoved the towel into her sports bag and searched in the pocket for her mobile. Three days and still she’d heard nothing from Nick. She looked at the screen in frustration. Every time she received a text message she opened it expecting it to be from him. The last time they’d spoken everything was fine. She was sure that nothing had happened between them that might have led to this. There had been no argument, no cross words, which made his silence simply incomprehensible. She’d tried calling him again before she began the class. The phone had rung out and she’d left a message saying that she hoped that everything was okay.
Throwing on a fleece, Michelle zipped up her sports bag and prepared to go home. She turned off the lights in the sports hall, said goodnight to the security man at the front desk and walked out of the community centre into the dark rain-filled streets. Already damp with perspiration, her hair clung to her forehead. She pushed it out of her eyes and hurried down the street. Outside the car park a homeless man sat, paper cup in hand, the hood of his jumper pulled up ineffectively against the rain. Michelle dug a few coins out of her pocket and dropped them in giving the man a brief smile. He mumbled words of thanks and wished her a good night as she walked inside. She knew his face. She’d talked to him once, some months before when she’d begun volunteering on the soup run with the Simon Community. He’d told her about being made redundant, and about a messy divorce in which his wife had got everything. He swore he didn’t touch drugs or alcohol, but most of them said that – it wasn’t her job to believe or to judge them. She hadn’t seen him in a while, had hoped that maybe his luck had changed, but the same faces always returned to the streets. Some of them she knew by name now – the ones who were glad to chat. This man had stood out because he sounded educated. He’d once, he said, held a senior position in a logistics company, and she wondered again about the circumstances that had led to him being in the street that night.
In the car park, she took the stairs two steps at a time until she’d reached the fifth floor. She hated these places at night – eerily lit by florescent lights – cars packed together, a predator could easily lie undetected waiting on a lone female to return to her car. Keys in hand, she unlocked the car from several metres away, and walked briskly, head held high until hurriedly she pulled open the driver’s door and climbed inside. When she turned the key in the ignition the radio came on and the gravellish tones of Tom Waits sang ‘Closing Time’ into the night.
Nick. She couldn’t get him out of her mind. It had been like that from the beginning, but whereas then her thoughts were pleasant and giddy, now they brought fear and uncertainty. She tried to reassure herself. Nick was crazy about her, he’d told her that. Only two weeks before he’d invited her out for dinner to meet his sister and her husband – a step that she believed he hadn’t taken with anyone else since divorcing his wife. Afterwards, he’d told her that his sister had been mad about her, and that Rowdy the dog was too, so he reckoned he’d have to keep her. And now a whole weekend had passed without so much as a call.
Michelle spiralled down the ramps and exited the car park. The rain had started to come down heavier, and she turned the wipers on to clear the windscreen. The homeless man had gone – she hoped he’d managed to find shelter for the night. The city streets were almost deserted. A woman struggled with an umbrella blown inside out in the wind and driving rain. Tom Waits’s melancholic tones were replaced by the unmistakable sound of Pearl Jam as Michelle found herself turning in the opposite direction of home and driving instead towards Nick’s house. She had to find out what had happened to prevent him from calling her. Perhaps he was ill, or worse still had had an accident. Whatever the reason, her fears would not abate until she’d satisfied herself that he was all right – that there was a reasonable explanation for, what felt by now, his interminable silence.
Michelle felt her heart quicken as she turned onto Nick’s road. She slowed as she approached the house, terrified that she might see Nick’s ex-wife’s car in the driveway – or worse. Surrounded by trees, it wasn’t possible to see the house until she’d pulled up at the gate. Outside the front door the light was on. It shone onto the wet tarmac revealing the absence of Nick’s car. Michelle looked at the clock that showed it was after nine. It was unusual for Nick to be out on a Monday evening. He’d normally have just finished walking Rowdy round the block. She’d learned his routine in the time they’d been together. Though she figured he wouldn’t have even ventured out with the dog on a night like this. She was sitting there wondering what to do when her phone blipped. She opened the text, immediately saw Nick’s name and read the brief message:
Call you tomorrow. N x.
At least she knew that he was all right. She read the short message several times as though the words might change or give her some clue as to what was going on in his mind. She wondered briefly why he’d signed off with his initial. It wasn’t something he normally did. Nor was the single kiss characteristic of his usual effusive messages, punctuated with kisses after almost every sentence. But then the message itself was a mere one line.
Michelle closed the message, put the phone on the seat next to her and started the engine. Wherever Nick was and whatever he was doing he clearly couldn’t or didn’t want to speak to her. His message had been of little consolation, save the fact that it confirmed he was alive, but that came with its own anxieties – namely that his feelings for her might have changed.
Michelle took a deep breath and tried to still the chaotic thoughts that raced and circled in her mind. She would go home, take a shower and try to concentrate on a book or a movie, anything that might distract her from the negative feelings that Nick’s absence had caused her. She knew that to dwell too long on a fear was to fulfil the prophecy – whatever was going on with Nick right now, she told herself it probably had nothing to do with her. He would talk to her when he was ready. The last thing she wanted to do was to push him into anything he wasn’t ready for. She had to prove that she was the antithesis of everything his ex-wife had been.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nick
Nick woke in the night to the sound of a woman’s voice in his ear. He flailed blindly for the lamp and knocked over a glass of water on the bedside locker. When he finally found the switch, the light dispelled the auditory apparition, but failed to slow his racing heart. The voice had been distinct, angry, but what bothered him most was he hadn’t caught the words that the woman had said – and yet somehow, he knew her voice: it was Rachel’s.
Sweating, he sat up and threw back the covers. Rachel, the woman from his dream; why was it that she seemed so real to him now? He got out of bed and pulled on his jeans. His hands were shaking badly, and a pulse throbbed in his left temple. Had he been dreaming before the voice had woken him? He didn’t remember. He just remembered the voice so close to his ear that he’d jumped.
Downstairs, Nick switched the kettle on. He gripped the counter wishing that he’d not poured out the half bottle of whiskey that he’d had in the press two days before. The prescription that the doctor had given him lay on the living room table. He’d been prescribed Valium and Librium, drugs whose names he was familiar with but had never anticipated having to use. The doctor had said there would be withdrawal symptoms, but he hadn’t expected to feel this bad. The drugs would have helped to ease the tremors, and now with trembling hands he made a mug of coffee, heaped in four spoons of sugar, and wished that he’d heeded the doctor’s advice to have the script filled right away.
Nick took his coffee into the living room, and rummaged in his coat pocket for his cigarettes, but then remembered he’d smoked his last in the car after his appointment – his only immediate means of self-medication gone. He sat back in his armchair, sipped the too-sweet coffee. Bars of light filtered through the venetian blind and bathed the room in the orange hue of the streetlight. It fell on the painting that Michelle had bought him for his birthday the previous month, a print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Michelle. He was glad she couldn’t see him like this. She didn’t even know he had a drink problem, or if she suspected it, she’d never said. He was rarely drunk. Over the years his body had developed such a tolerance that he’d had to drink more and more to feel the effects. Michelle drank, too, but one glass of wine and she was more than a little tipsy. She hated the taste of beer and he suspected that she only drank wine to be sociable.
Nick picked up his phone and scrolled through her last few messages. She’d said that she hoped everything was all right. If only she knew how not all right things were. He knew she’d stick by him, he wasn’t afraid of that, but why should she have to? They’d only been seeing each other for eight months and he didn’t expect her to take on the burden of his illness. He knew it was going to be awful, the abstinence and the unbearable wait for a donor to be found – for someone else’s ill fate to determine his continued existence.
He thought about the length of time it might take to find a suitable donor, if they found a suitable donor. The doctor had been frank about that. Type O negative was the rarest blood group. He had to face the facts. Apart from that there were the horror stories portrayed in the media: patients who died while on the transplant list, all because there weren’t enough people carrying donor cards. He hadn’t had one himself, had never even thought about it before he’d found himself in this bind. He hated to admit it, but Susan had been right. He’d screwed up his life.
When he’d met Michelle, he thought that things were turning around, that maybe he had a chance at real happiness, but now he couldn’t bear to break the news to her, to drag her into his self-made mess. The thought of letting her go was agonizing, but how could they plan a future when he couldn’t be sure that, for him, such a thing even existed? She deserved so much more than that.
Nick gulped the last of his coffee, winced at the accumulation of sugar at the bottom of the mug and thought he might be sick. The caffeine had momentarily eased the thudding in his temple, but his hands were shaking worse than ever and he wondered how he was going to get back to sleep. He remembered an all-night pharmacy that he’d seen a couple of kilometres away and wondered if he was fit to drive. Then he picked up the prescription, stuck it in his jeans pocket and pulled his leather jacket on. He needed those tablets badly.
Outside, the rain was still coming down. Nick ran to the car; he started the engine, set the wipers on full speed and drove out of the housing estate. He was shivering, but his skin felt hot. It was almost 2 a.m. when he pulled into the shopping centre car park, which was empty save for two cars he imagined belonged to the pharmacy staff. Shivering, he cut the engine and stepped into the wet night.
The pharmacist looked at the prescription, asked him to confirm his address and disappeared out the back. One look at him and he was pretty sure the pharmacist could identify a victim of detox. Not only were his hands shaking, he was perspiring too. His hands and face were clammy to the touch. A few minutes later, the pharmacist reappeared. He went through the directions with Nick but didn’t refer to his condition. He didn’t know what Librium was used for apart from withdrawal, but he knew that his mother had taken Valium after the shock of his father’s death, so he supposed these drugs were used to treat a number of conditions. He thanked the man, put the small pharmacy bag in the inside pocket of his jacket and went back out in the rain.
In the car, he fumbled on the floor until he came across a half bottle of water that had rolled under the passenger seat. He swallowed two tablets and hoped that it wouldn’t be long before they began to take effect. The rain was still teeming down as he exited the car park; the wipers, set on automatic, raced to clear the windscreen. The coffee hadn’t helped; if anything, it had made him feel even more jittery. He thought of the session with the hypnotist – about what she’d said about confabulation. He’d looked it up on the Internet and the definition was just as Tessa had said: a false memory, or pseudo memory, a term that was used in cognitive psychology defined as a recollection of something that had never happened.
He’d considered what she’d said about some people believing that confabulations under hypnosis were memories from their past lives, and he’d changed his search to ‘hypnosis and past life regression’, laughing at himself even as he did so. If only Michelle could see him now; she loved that kind of thing. He thought of all the times he’d teased her about her interest in the occult. He’d scoffed when she’d told him about her visits to an elderly gypsy lady – even when she’d insisted that the woman had known things, specific things about her family that couldn’t simply have been speculation. ‘And what does this lady do?’ he’d asked. ‘Read your palm, your cards?’ Michelle had told him that, no, the woman simply held your hand and gently rubbed it, that it was as if by touching you that she could access those private recesses of your mind. ‘Of course she can,’ he’d argued, ‘your hand probably jerks every time she hits on something and she just goes with it.’ Michelle had laughed and called him a sceptic. What would she think of him now, making appointments with a hypnotist and reading about regression and past lives?
Nick was preoccupied with such thoughts when a dark shape suddenly stepped in the road in front of him. He jerked the wheel, thankful there were no cars on the other side of the road. Heart hammering, he pulled into the kerb and checked the rear-view mirror. The man had reached the opposite side of the road and was fumbling with something that Nick imagined to be a sleeping bag. Nick got out of the car, his legs weak, and walked back to the man who seemed ready to bed down in a doorway for the night.
‘Jesus, man, are you all right? I could have killed you,’ he said.
The man looked at him unfazed and continued setting up his bed for the night, a dirty green sleeping bag that looked as though, like the man, it had been soaked through.
Nick put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a fifty-euro note. ‘Look, get yourself into a hostel for the night, man. It’s no night to be in the street.’
The stranger looked at him, and at the money in his hand. ‘Are you sure? I wasn’t asking …’ There were tears in the man’s eyes.
Nick was surprised at his timbre. He didn’t sound like someone who should’ve been in the street. Embarrassed, he thrust the money into the man’s hand.
‘God bless you for this,’ the man said. ‘God bless you.’
Nick dashed back to the car. When he looked in the mirror again, he saw that the man had bundled up his sleeping bag and was walking in a brisk manner in the direction of the city. Only if he were lucky, Nick knew, would he find a shelter for the night.
Shaken by the experience, along with his symptoms, Nick drove home slowly, absorbed still by thoughts of reincarnation. In his search that afternoon, he’d come across an excerpt from a book called Many Lives, Many Masters, by a Dr Brian L. Weiss, MD, an American psychotherapist. It told the story of how Weiss, a sceptic, had learned to believe in past lives when a patient of his had been accidentally transported to a past life during standard hypnotherapy. Nick had read the two-page extract and then re-read it. It seemed that Weiss’s patient had found herself in a different time and place, just as he had. He’d refreshed his search. The Internet was full of stories of people who claimed to have lived before. Finally, annoyed with himself for even entertaining such a ridiculous idea, he’d closed down his computer. Hocus pocus, that’s all it was. What he’d experienced was a confabulation. It had to be.
Chiding himself still for his foolishness, Nick reached the house without further incident. He knew that his jumbled thoughts were most likely a further consequence of the withdrawal from alcohol – something that he hoped the medication would help with when it had had a chance to get into his system. In darkness, he climbed the stairs, longing for the oblivion that sleep might bring and trying to put from his mind what might happen at his next session with Tessa. He would phone her to make another appointment in the morning. Regardless of what might happen, he’d need the woman’s help to quit drinking.
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